(upbeat music) (camera lens beeping) (upbeat music) (graphics whooshing) (upbeat music) (dramatic music) - Thanks for joining us on "CapitolView."

I'm Fred Martino.

Last week was extraordinary in Chicago with a Democratic National Convention unprecedented in so many ways.

We're going to hear from two reporters who were there, and we'll find out what Illinois delegates are saying, and how they plan to help Democrats win in November.

Welcome, Mawa Iqbal and Alex Degman, both of WBEZ Chicago.

Welcome, guys.

- Thank you.

- Hey, thanks for having me.

- Good to have you both with us.

Alex, I wanna start with you.

This was an extremely important event for Governor J.B. Pritzker and for Chicago.

To start, I'd love to hear your thoughts on how it went, and also what you're hearing from Illinois delegates.

- Well, I think the convention got a lot of help by Chicago, the city itself being on its best behavior weather-wise.

It was a beautiful week, and generally speaking, you hear people from Chicago say the summer is generally the time that you wanna go there, because that's when you're gonna fall in love with it, especially with temperatures in the mid-70s.

It was sunny, just absolutely gorgeous.

So logistically speaking, things went pretty well from weather to people getting around.

You know, you did hear about traffic snarls with the motorcades.

You did hear about things like that.

But by and large, most of the Illinois delegates that I talked to said that this was a pretty good showing for Chicago and for Illinois, so much so that you started hearing J.B. Pritzker talking about hosting the DNC in Chicago again in 2028, and some of us kind of thought he was being tongue-in-cheek about that, like, "Oh, okay, you know, we just did this.

"Come on, let's do something else."

But honestly, like there is some precedent for it.

There's some past precedent for Chicago hosting multiple conventions within, you know, a pretty short timeframe.

So I think the governor, with his aspirations, whatever they may be, he may be looking to do this again.

Now, that's not to say that it was a perfect week, because it wasn't.

There were instances where protests got out of control.

We saw that on Tuesday night with some pretty violent protests outside the Israeli consulate downtown, where more than 70 people were arrested.

That was the most violent night out of all of it, and then you heard stories here and there about delegates being robbed at gunpoint, and the Colorado after-party, where there was a shooting, so- - Yeah.

- By and large, it was not a perfect week, but- - Yeah.

- I think given the concerns that people had going into the convention about protests, about whether buses full of migrants would start reappearing, I think most of the Illinois delegates thought this was a good showing.

- And a little later in the show, we'll have a little more time to talk about some of the fears about protests, and what measures may have been taken to try to deal with that, and the end result.

But just quickly, Alex, before we move on, just your overall reaction to the program.

I mean, I think I've heard a lot of people were really surprised in such a short amount of time with Kamala Harris becoming the candidate for president, the organization of the speakers, the videos, it really was, many people thought remarkable the quick turnaround.

- It was, and I think that people just kind of got into overdrive after the announcement was made that President Biden was stepping aside, because you're right.

You saw the types of videos that were being displayed.

Those don't just happen overnight.

They take a lot of time.

They take a lot of coordination, and the programming, I mean, they over-programmed.

There were a lot of instances where speakers had to be cut for time, and that kind of caused some consternation that maybe we can get into later.

But they were prepared to have a full slate of people to talk about why Kamala Harris should be the next president.

- Yeah, it was quite something.

Mawa, you were on the floor for a real highlight of the week, speeches by former President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama.

I would love to hear your thoughts, what that was like.

Take us there, and then what Illinois delegates were saying after that remarkable experience, which before we started taping, I said, "You will, I'm sure, never forget."

- I mean, totally.

Like you said, I think the Obama speeches were definitely a highlight not only of that night, but just the week in general, and for a lot of Illinois delegates too, just 'cause of the local significance that Barack and Michelle both have to Illinois, to Chicago.

It was really powerful, I think.

You know, the floor was packed, right?

So there were reporters, and delegates, and fans, people just on the floor.

We were packed like sardines, shoulder to shoulder, and you could tell people were trying to crane their neck to see the stage as best as they could, 'cause it was a real like big ticket event, right, to have both Michelle and then Barack back to back, side by side, and the speeches themselves were pretty incredible.

I think, you know, like we know that Barack, of course, is a great orator, but Michelle's was definitely particularly of interest just 'cause of how fiery it was, right?

So she really came after Trump, she really came after J.D.

Vance, and I think what really resonated with the audience was her call to action, this theme of get up and do something, you know, like now is the time to just go and do something, and elect Kamala Harris and Vice President Tim Walz.

And so, when I was talking to delegates afterwards, I mean, it was just kind of like the room was really buzzing with excitement.

So everyone was still kind of almost dazed, and sort of like, "Whoa," like, you know, shocked that they had just seen such incredible speeches, and the delegates I talked to, who were Senate Majority Leader Kimberly Lightford, Representative Kam Buckner, Representative Camille Lilly, and Representative Jehan Gordon-Booth, these four people were, you know, they work in the State House in Springfield, and they were saying that just seeing, you know, them up there on this national stage was really inspiring to them, and something that they would like to carry back with them when they come back to Springfield in the fall, and especially for Representative Buckner, he says that his district is the district where Michelle Obama grew up.

So just being a fan of the Obamas for a really long time, getting to see them up close and personal I think was really special for a lot of these lawmakers.

- Yeah, well, Mawa, another highlight was the speech by vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, his son, Gus, breaking into tears of pride, exclaiming, "That's my dad."

It was an unforgettable moment.

Again, your thoughts on this, and then what the delegates were saying to you about it?

- That was another one, yeah, I think was a real highlight of Wednesday night, you know?

The vibe was definitely that of a pep rally, which I think was totally intentional, right, 'cause he was a former football coach.

So like he had all of his former football players come out in jerseys, and with the brass band playing, and, you know, then when he talked during his actual speech, he was comparing this election to like a football game, and just talking about how he's, you know, kind of a down home, you know, Midwestern man who comes from a small town I think really resonated with a lot of people, and particularly a lot of delegates who represent more like smaller communities in Illinois.

So it was really cool to see that, and I think, like you said, Gus Walz crying, and saying, "That's my dad," was definitely a highlight for a lot of delegates.

During the breakfast the following morning, you had Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias talking about how, you know, him being a dad himself, seeing, you know, Gus, his son, crying was really emotional for him.

You also had Dick Durbin saying that too.

So I think just like seeing how proud his son was of his dad really resonated with a lot of people.

- It certainly did, and people still talking about that, getting a lot of traction on social media as well.

Alex, I wanna talk about the role for Illinois moving forward.

I understand that many people who were at the DNC say that they are now gonna go to swing states to knock on doors.

You know, this reminded me of Michelle Obama and her speech saying along with the excitement, along with the hope that she was talking about, she warned this is a hard road this next couple of months to the election.

Your reaction to folks saying here that they're now motivated and ready to go to these swing states.

and why this is so important if indeed Democrats hope to win not only the White House, but perhaps hang on to the Senate, and perhaps retake the House?

- Well, I think that the reactions that I got on this topic are a lot different than they probably would've been maybe two months ago with President Biden still at the top of the ticket.

And to be fair, I don't know if it's necessarily new that people from Illinois go into places like Wisconsin and Michigan during election years.

It may very well be a timeworn tradition, but at the same time, this year there seems to be a little bit more oomph behind it, because it's not just the people at the DNC that I was talking to.

It was also some of the rank and file voters that I met at watch parties, and people like on the street at the Blue Line stops.

People seem to be fired up.

So the idea behind this is that we can be as excited about Illinois, Democrats can be as excited about Illinois as they wanna be, but Illinois is going to be a Kamala Harris state.

I mean, let's be honest, Donald Trump is not gonna win Illinois.

He hasn't really ever performed well here.

So there's no expectation that he's gonna do any better this time around.

So a lot of Illinois delegates and just regular Democratic voters are saying, "Now's the time to take some of that energy from the DNC "and let's go north a little bit.

"Let's start knocking on doors.

"Let's talk to some people who are registered Democrats "who haven't voted in a while.

"You know, why haven't you voted in a while?

"Is it time to maybe go back to the polls?"

Well, yes, they're gonna say that it is, obviously, but it's those kinds of things, like targeting the Democrats who haven't voted in a while, targeting the independents, who are, you know, maybe still undecided.

There are a lot of folks who are going to be undecided up until the very end, up until like maybe the last week.

Those are the kind of people that they're trying to get ahold of in Wisconsin and Michigan, which, despite recent polls showing Vice President Harris may be moving ahead a little bit, it's still a long time to Election Day.

So that's the kind of energy that we're seeing coming out of the DNC.

It's not just about, you know, maintaining Illinois, and keeping it blue, which is what you may have heard in recent years as, you know, state Democrats try to build supermajorities, but, you know, now it's time to shore up the Midwest.

What can Illinois do to shore up the Midwest, and make it a blue bastion instead of just Illinois?

- Yeah.

And it can't, you know, it can't be forgotten.

It's so important that we have to, when we talk about this, you know, pay attention always to those swing states, and can't forget that in 2016, Hillary Clinton received almost 3 million more votes nationally, but did not take the White House, due to the Electoral College, and the swing states, where she fell slightly short.

So that is the context, and it's so important in looking at this election as well.

Mawa, labor unions, a major theme as well at the DNC.

Labor leaders from several local, state, and national unions were part of the speaking program, as well as the Illinois delegation breakfasts.

Tell us what you heard, and the union plans to help in the campaign.

- Yeah, so like Alex mentioned, there is a real push to like go canvassing and door knocking in these swing states, so specifically Wisconsin and Michigan, which a lot of political analysts will call the blue wall states, because, you know, since 1992, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, these northern states that are swing states now were blue until like 2016, and when Donald Trump took those states.

And so, you know, there's a lot of attention to get these states also because they have a lot of electoral weight, and I think with the labor unions, you know, their messaging was, "We have to," like, "We all the support from the union leaders," like, you know, you have Shawn Fain with the United Auto Workers, you have the IBEW, which represents electrical workers all coming out in full force endorsing Kamala Harris, you know?

But the Democrats, the Democratic Party, it was very clear after this week that they're really concerned with trying to get the more rank and file union workers, people in these swing states, like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, where a lot of manufacturing jobs have left, right, have been outsourced, to try to get them to come back to the Democrat side, because they've typically more or less have gone to the Republican side and voted more for Trump.

So that was very prominent.

Like you mentioned, you know, there are a lot of union labor leaders speaking at these delegate breakfasts.

You know, we had AFSCME, who represents the state workers here in Illinois, we had the AFL-CIO, we had IBEW, United Auto Workers, all these people coming and talking about how the Democrats, the Democratic Party will protect workers' rights in the sense that we will, you know, we will protect unions, we will protect workers' rights to organize, make sure that they retire with dignity, have their wages, all those things.

And they, when I talked to these leaders about like, you know, when you do go to these swing states, like Wisconsin, Michigan, right, the ones that are like literally right there border-wise, like what is your plan, they told me that, you know, what they plan on doing is they have this whole member system set up.

So they'll make calls to their members in these other states and just kind of like put the records of, you know, the Biden-Harris administration, and compare it with the record of the Trump administration, and just sort of side by side show them like, okay, this is how workers' rights fared during the Biden administration, this is how they fared during the Trump administration, 2016.

So they said, you know, like, "We can't obviously force our workers to vote "either which way, but what we can try to do is make, "you know, an extra effort to reach these swing state voters "and just kind of show them, you know, "like this is what you can have "under a Harris-Walz presidency."

- Yes, and of course, Governor Walz frequently talks about his record on supporting unions in Minnesota, including a law there that he signed that does not allow employees to be forced to attend meetings organized by their employer to talk about why unions are a bad idea, you shouldn't vote for a union, this captive audience idea.

And certainly, as you know, the General Assembly in Illinois just passed a similar law in Illinois.

So very, very, very much part of the campaign not only for president, but other campaigns as well, this idea that Democrats are paying attention to the renewed activism of many unions.

- Mm-hmm, yeah, definitely.

I think, you know, the legislature here in Illinois has passed a lot of labor protections, so like you mentioned, the prohibition on captive audience meetings.

They've also updated the child labor laws.

And recently, they had a law that went in effect that would protect child influencers, so like kids who appear in these like so-called mommy vlogs to make sure they get compensation for it if they're getting money for the content.

So yeah, that was something that a lot of the delegates were talking about too were just that, you know, we come from a very strong union background, not only personally with my family, but Illinois has had a long history, a long Democratic history of protecting workers' rights.

- Yes, very interesting and an important point.

Alex, let's return to something you mentioned earlier, and that is the protests that did occur at the DNC.

I know, as you said earlier, there were some demonstrations that turned violent, but perhaps the overall picture was better than expected.

And this week, you know, we're hearing that the Illinois State Police, it was their largest deployment in their history at the DNC.

- Yeah, I would say that law enforcement largely counted this as a pretty big win, because the protests as we were heading into the DNC were thought to be pretty large.

We heard from organizers for a coalition of a number of groups to march on the DNC that they were expecting tens of thousands of people to show up at Union Park, and there were a lot of concerns that the route that they were being given by the city wasn't large enough to accommodate that, and there were concerns that people were gonna be spilling out onto major boulevards, and police were gonna be swooping people up for that.

And some of that did happen, but not to the extent that was feared.

We saw protestors start to gather on the first day of the DNC, and to be completely clear, I did not cover the protests myself.

We had other, some of my other colleagues, like three, or four of them at WBEZ were embedded in the protests, but walking around down by the arena, by the convention perimeter, they were definitely a presence.

You knew they were there.

The whole point that they were trying to get across was that we need to be within sight and sound of the United Center.

All of these ideas that you have of us being by Grant Park on Columbus Drive out by Michigan Avenue, that's not gonna work.

We need to be, you know, where we are.

They ended up being across the, like across Ashland from the United Center in the park over there.

So by and large, except for the first day, there were some instances during the march where some protective barriers got taken down.

There were a few arrests there, but by and large, no violence, not a whole lot of destruction.

Tuesday night, as I mentioned a little bit earlier in the program, things did get out of hand.

Police, there were some, you know, there was vandalism to police cars, there were injuries, there were lots of arrests, so dozens of arrests.

And that was probably the most violent night out of all of them.

I would say that the protests that continued in Union Park pretty much throughout the week, they were there all week making their demands heard, and as you walked around in the perimeter, the sound system that they had was quite good.

You could hear the chants.

They were over a half mile away.

So I think that there was a very, the protest atmosphere was there.

It was a very big component of the week.

But what I also think was that the protest organizers put a lot of information out there that maybe didn't come to fruition.

They thought that tens of thousands of people were gonna show up, and there just wasn't that many.

So it was easier for police to handle, it was easier for the city to handle, and I hope organizers thought that they got their point across.

- Yeah, very interesting stuff, and certainly law enforcement was prepared.

A lot of law enforcement on the scene.

Mawa, the Illinois delegates got to hear from political luminaries, like the Reverend Raphael Warnock, Senator from Georgia, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear.

Of course, they all spoke as well at the DNC in prime time.

But this is different.

These were meetings that most of us did not see.

Tell us what you heard, and what Illinois Democrats were saying about these meetings.

- Yeah, no, these breakfasts were a really good time, I think, to get a really close-up look at some of these like really heavy hitters in politics, right, like these really big names, and to get a more intimate experience with them.

So, you know, Secretary Pete Buttigieg, when he opened up his remarks, he talked about how Chicago has a very special place in his heart, right?

Like his husband, Chasten, was a DePaul University graduate, and he proposed to him in the O'Hare Airport, So that got a lot of reaction from the crowd, I think.

And then you had Andy Beshear up there talking about how, you know, just kind of his message was, you know, "We all need to come together," but also talking about personal anecdotes here and there, like, you know, how he spends time with his kids, and we had Reverend Raphael Warnock talking about how he is now a senior pastor at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, which was also where Martin Luther King Jr. was a preacher, and how he officiated the funeral for civil rights activist John Lewis.

So really got to hear a lot of cool personal anecdotes from these big names, and I think that really, you know, stuck with a lot of people in the crowd.

I know for me, personally, it was very interesting, because I had just known of these names, like kind of, you know, from like a distance, right?

Like obviously Andy Beshear and Pete Buttigieg were sort of part of the veepstakes, you know, when Kamala Harris was still figuring out who to pick, or I guess the party was figuring out who to pick as the VP nomination.

But yeah, I guess getting to hear a little bit about them personally was pretty cool.

You know, it just kind of brings another dimension to who they are, and why they're in politics, so- - Absolutely.

Alex, we just have a few minutes left, and I wanted to give you a chance to talk about another thing that was so interesting at this DNC, and something that for many people will be unforgettable, and that was the number of Republican speakers at the event, including former Illinois Congressman Adam Kinzinger, who not only took on former President Donald Trump and endorsed Kamala Harris for president, but took on his party, said his party, and others said this, was no longer conservative, many people would argue a very important point, because often the term conservative is falsely used as a synonym for Republican, and they're not the same thing.

He called that out, and so did Geoff Duncan of Georgia, lieutenant governor in Georgia, said the same thing.

- Yeah, it's a theme that we started seeing pop up.

I mean, I guess you could say that Adam Kinzinger has been anti-Trump for years.

I couldn't tell you exactly how many years, but he was one of the first national voices to come out against Trump as a Republican, and Democrats this year were hoping to capitalize on that, because there are a growing number of those Republicans.

I mean, even in Illinois, Illinois is a really good example.

You have people like Adam Kinzinger, but then you also have former Governor Jim Edgar.

You have former Illinois House Minority Leader Jim Durkin.

You have a lot of moderate Republicans in Illinois who are not necessarily on board with this brand of Republicanism that's surfaced since Trump was president.

So, and Adam Kinzinger took that to the national stage, which a lot of Democrats think is important as they try to court these undecided voters heading into November, 'cause that's really what it's about, right?

It's about winning the election.

It's about putting every single resource that you can into winning the election, and they're hoping that some of these Republicans will convince people who are still registered Republicans that there are other choices.

You don't have to vote for President Trump if you don't want to.

And what I thought was pretty astonishing about this, just for me personally, was the number of people on social media after the speech who started speaking up.

There were people that I have on my Facebook and Instagram friends and follow lists that I hadn't heard from in years, certainly not about politics, but then all of a sudden, they pop up with these messages of, "You know what, Congressman Kinzinger's right.

"This is my party, this is what I'm gonna do.

"Are you with me, Republicans?"

And I didn't even know that they were Republican.

So that just kind of shows you, like at least anecdotally, how far in the shadow some Republicans have been over the last, you know, few years with Trump as president.

- Yeah.

- But therein also lies a problem with that, because you also have a lot of progressives on the Democrat side who are saying, "Well, now, wait a minute, Adam Kinzinger, "whether he likes Trump, or not, "he's still an anti-abortion Republican.

"Why are we giving anti-abortion Republicans "like Adam Kinzinger prime time speaking spots on the stage "when we're not allowing Palestinian American Democrats "to have their time on the stage, not even two minutes "to talk about their views on the war in Gaza?"

So it's a very interesting dichotomy that's going on in the Democratic Party- - Yeah.

- Because you need to put- - Well- - People out there to win the election, yet how do you please everybody?

- Yeah, very difficult to do, always.

Alex, Mawa, thank you both for your insights and for your coverage.

Really appreciate it.

- Absolutely, thanks.

- Yeah, you're welcome.

- Thank you at home as well.

For everyone at WSIU, I'm Fred Martino.

Have a great week.

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